Can white guy american atheists issue fatwas against actors?
Just wonderin'.

Is nothing sacred?

Another great piece of nostalgia ruined by Hollywood: The Wild Wild West.
Very cool '60's serial that was mis-cast and poorly written and directed.

Will Smith as a 19th century government agent? Smith has the cavalier-ish, irreverant attitiude, but he aon't no James West. And Kevin Kline is the most boring screen presence ever. Selma Hayek is a terrible actress, also.

Dumb and Dumber are back at it. God help us all. Are there any original ideas left in Hollywood?

And let me add: They're stupid.

Any mongoloid can greenlight movies based on successful comic books, TV shows from the 70's, NYT bestsellers, or old movies.

Have I covered 90% of Hollywood's product for the past two decades?

Oh right. I forgot sequels.

There are armies of writers just dying to put their visions onscreen. The real problem is the dead hand of a creatively bankrupt bureaucracy.

God, I can't wait for them to die.

You're right, it is just like Brokeback Mountain! And Matt and Ben are gonna have to argue over who gets to be butch, and who gets to pretend he's the kid. Snark.

I bet millions of Americans would be glad to see a pro-troops, pro-war, pro-America movie. Or a bunch of such movies. How many such movies were made in the period 1942-45?

Instead, the SAG Full Employment & Progressive Indoctrination Junta comes up with utter crap or remakes the classics, thinking they can do better than the geniuses who preceeded them.

I can hardly wait for the remake of Casablanca.

Nearly every Hollywood movie is a remake of a movie, or of 2 or 3 combined.

This is not always a bad thing.

I think the Maltese Falcon that everybody thinks of as the original was the third version in a little over a decade.

An original is a remake so good that you forget it's a remake.

Same concept applies to translations, fiction, and pretty much all of life and its creations.

"How many such movies were made in the period 1942-45?"

Not very many, I think. Lots of good escapist stuff though.

You want classic WWII movies, you gotta wait till 1949 and later. Mostly, it's a 50s thing.

In the late 40s you got a lot of movies that seemed to be about war vets having trouble adapting to society, though the actual hero-as-vet was not typical. Crack-up, Detour are a couple of examples. Lots of amnesia films. There must be 50 surviving films about guys with amnesia from '47-'49.

There hasn't been a good remake of a true classic in years.

I see that they are remaking "When a Stranger Calls" How about they RE-RELEASE THE ORIGINAL!!!! It's much less expensive, and if you promote it? the original would still be more terrifying.

liberal

In the movie he'll be named "Tom DeLay".

Charlie Wilson's War was an excellent book, and I don't know how you could ruin it, but they'll find a way and I'll leave the theatre dissapointed.

Tom Hanks will probably do a good job though.

So Hollywood is finally crabwalking towards the issue of Islamofascist terror with Syriana, Munich, andCharlie Wilson. They'll feed us a diet of It's All Our Fault, and when the box office is disappointing, they'll decide that nobody's interested in the subject. Just ask Jack Bauer.

I doubt I'll bother to see the Sunny goes Butch, but the other may depend on how much Hanks pushes for a good [truthful] treatment.

Oh, Christ. Many of the men the CIA funded went on to become Bin Laden's protectors? First of all, not that this is inherently incongruent, but OBL was sponsored by Saudi Arabia as a foreign fighter against the USSR. There may have been some cross over, but the Afghan war was still a good idea. But the truth is is that America only funded the locals. If some of these guys went on to side with the Taliban, well, many others went on to be part of the Northern Alliance (re: the gooder guys). What weak shit by someone who couldn't care to know better. How many layers of editors did that go through?

I see Ace still owe Fark some milk money, though.

How about this, write a movie about something I want to see? Even with a 76" 720p at home, I would still pay top dollar to eat crappy buttered popcorn for movies that aren't part of the left-myth creation process. I can't wait to see the USSR portrayed as caring providers of free, universal health care to an uneducated back-water people. People who voted (and fought) against their own economic self-interest.

and I don't think a 3 hour movie about a monkey counts.

"How many such movies were made in the period 1942-45?" Quite a few.

tubino seems to read "pro-troops, pro-war, pro-America" as "war movies", but Hollywood produced films that at least touched on those themes..

Casablanca (1942)
To Be Or Not To Be (1942)
Yankee Doodle Dandee (1942)
This Is The Army (1943, starred Ronald Reagan!)

They even had some films touching on those themes before the US entered the war ("beating the drums of war", so to speak.) Most notably The Great Dictator (1940), also Foreign Correspondent (1940) and so forth.

That's not even counting all the propaganda flicks, the Why We Fight series, and so forth. There's a whole bunch more here, including this bit of Hollywood history:

The world was headed toward rearmament and warfare in the early to mid-1940s, and the movie industry, like every other aspect of life, responded to the national war effort by making movies, producing many war-time favorites, and having stars (and film industry employees) enlist or report for duty. The US government's Office of War Information (OWI), formed in 1942, served as an important propaganda agency during World War II, and coordinated its efforts with the film industry to record and photograph the nation's war-time activities. Tinseltown aided in the defensive mobilization, whether as combatants, propagandists, documentary, newsreel or short film-makers, educators, fund-raisers for relief funds or war bonds, entertainers, or morale-boosters. Films took on a more realistic rather than escapist tone, as they had done during the Depression years of the 30s.

Not only will the Hollywood celebrities, directors, and producers not make movies for the current war effort, they won't even entertain the troops in the field.

The WWF wrestlers should receive a lot of props for making several trips to Iraq. You won't see Access Hollywood or Extra or E! mention entetainment in Iraq. Instead, it's all about the latest sighting of Paris Hilton.

I can understand why Affleck would want to tie his flagging career to Damon's coattails, but I can't understand why Damon would want to go down with him

I think reinterpretations of classics could work:

Red Dawn: 2007
Starring Chris Klein, Lindsay Lohan, Hillary Duff, Powers Boothe

The Cubans are back, but this time they're with the Russians - but not the good Russians. The once-and-future Soviet types. Watch as twenty-five year olds playing 17 year olds take to the woods to defend their way of life.

Son of Ferris
Ferris Bueller has a son. And that son is about to graduate from high school. Uh oh!!!!!

Ferris takes the day off from work and tries to keep pace with his free-spirited son as the son explores Chicago during his day off. Hilarity ensues.

They should remake the Philadelphia Story with Affleck & Aniston, seeing as they're BOTH box office poison

Hollywood can ruin anything, so just because a book is good doesn't mean the movie won't reek. There is a gold mine of great books, screaming to be made into films, but no, apparently we need another movie telling us what a bad guy Joe McCarthy was. Likewise, there are tremendous, cinematic tales of heroism coming out of Iraq and Afghanistan all the time, but since that doesn't jive with an "America is sinister" agenda, they count for shit.

Oh, and Aaron Sorkin sucks.

"tubino seems to read "pro-troops, pro-war, pro-America" as "war movies",

You're right, I did.

but Hollywood produced films that at least touched on those themes.."

Those are really good examples you give. I was counting non -war movies from late 40s, so definitely apples to apples.

One of those earlier versions of Maltese Falcon had Bette Davis -- but had a different title IIRC. Still based on the Hammett novel though.

here we go again their remaking old classics becuase their too spaced out on drugs and booze no wonder hollywood is losing money and viewers

still waiting for Murdoch to launch a studio 'as a specific alternative to what is perceived as a liberal bias in American film.'

"Matt Damon & Ben Affleck To Remake 'Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid'"

Just more evidence, if needed, of the creative bankruptcy of Hollywood.

"Matt Damon & Ben Affleck To Remake 'Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid'

That's worse than than Will Ferril as Darrin in Bewitched.

Note to Hollyweird: Don't remake any Clint Eastwood movies starring Sean Penn. Please.

In light of the Broke Back Mountain craze that is sweeping the nation, somebody needs to ask if the gang they form is called "The Glory Hole in the Wall Gang" ...

... might as well be me.

---------------------------------------------------

I'm hoping that Ben and Matt return to their scriptwriting roots and add a Good Butch Hunting touch to the script.

I'd like to see Ben turn to Matt and say something like:

If we're still on the trail in twenty years, I'll just kill you. You're sitting on a winning lottery ticket but you're too afraid to cash it in. I hope to ride into camp one day and find that you're gone. No note, no nothing. Just gone. That's what I hope for.

and then have that happen.

Except the part about the camp being deserted. After Ben notices that Matt's gone, about 140 Mexican Federales ride up over the ridge and aerate him.

Peckinpah-style.

..

You know, remakes aren't all that bad. Kurosawa made Yojimbo, it was good. Leone made Fistful of Dollars, it was also good.

Of course, some twat then made Last Man Standing just to prove me wrong, but Last Man Standing isn't horrible, just not nearly as good as the others and a bit stupid around the edges. (Mobsters in the Mexican desert? Even if it was accurate, it looks stupid.)

It's almost like Matt and Ben were sitting around, caressing each other's thigh, and musing on what would make a good vehicle to showcase their incredible talents as just-a-bit-too-buddyish-buddies-for-a-buddy-movie-caper.

I was watchinig an old Jimmy Stewart movie and was suprised to see that it was the basis for the Tom Hanks / Meg Ryan movie, You've Got Mail. My point being that a lot of movies that I probably thought were originals are not.

Both actors are members of the Film Actors Guild and should have that credit accompanying their names.

Matt Damon, F.A.G.
Ben Affleck, F.A.G.

Credit where credit's due.

Bumperstickerist,

Do I have to delete *another* post for giving lefties really bad ideas?

Knock it off already!

roc ingersoll, that was "The Shop Around the Corner". I also just saw it recently. It's fantastic, and far far superior to "You've Got Mail". Everyone should check it out, it's terrific, and doesn't have that anti-corporate subtext.

I assume beautifulatrocities has seen "The Philadelphia Story", and thus probably knows it could NEVER be made today. After all, Cary Grant shoves Katherine Hepburn down via her face in a fit of pique. And marriage is seen as a good thing. And Jimmy Stewart makes a drunken pass at an equally drunken Kate Hepburn and it's not portrayed as a rape of some sort. And Kate Hepburn doesn't lament a lack of good men while castrating them at the same time. And there's no Desexed Wise Gay Pal or Magical Negro involved.

And also, we have no one in Hollywood today who has even a fraction of the star power and screen presence of Hepburn, Stewart and Grant, nor anyone of the directing capabilites of George Cukor.

If western remakes with a gay theme take-off, imagine the titles we might see:
"Homo on the Range”
“Total Makeover at the Ok Corral”
“He wore a yellow ribbon”
“The Good, The Bad and the Guy that is so Totally Wearing Off-the-Rack from Last Year, Girlfriend”
“Dances with Men”
“Seven brothers for seven brothers”
“Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid: A love story”
“How the West was Wooed”
“Lonesome Dude”
”Little Bathhouse on the Prairie”
"Urbane Cowboy"

And it will be without its award winning RAINDROPS ARE FALLING ON MY HEAD

Interesting point, spurwing. The song is so stronly associated with original movie, I can't imagine a remake without it. Yet, I can't think of a remake of a movie that used the score/song from the original.

Hey, what about The Great Raid? That was brutally honest.

Remaking "When a Stranger Calls" actually makes sense, since there's a lot of room for improvement there. Originally it was a short film, like 15 minutes or something. The entire rest of the movie is padding to get it to feature length.

I was tempted to predict that this "Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid" remake was something that would never actually happen, like the "African Queen" remake they were talking about for so long, but then, that's what I said about "Planet of the Apes". If they've already casted it, I'll bet they'll go ahead and do it.

What was the name of the Tarzan movie where he said "Tarzan make war now"? Cheetah killed a guy in that one.

Looks like a job for Kevin Smith and Jason Mewes. They could make a road trip documentary about driving cross-country to stop Ben & Matt from remaking an American Classic. It could have all sorts of witty walk-throughs by famous actors. George Carlin could play a cocksucking hitchhiker, Carrie Fisher could play a hairy-bushed nun, Judd Nelson could play a hick Utah sheriff, and Mark Harmon could play himself.

Wow, how come nobody else has ever come up with this idea before? It'll be Box. Office. Gold.